Photograph the receipt and we read it

You buy print for a client, tuck the receipt in a pocket, and invoice the design two weeks later without the print. The $48 is gone. Across a year of coffees, couriers, stock, and train tickets, the forgotten rebills are a quiet leak. They are not a rounding error if you do this every week. They are a line you never wrote down.

Expenses are Pro. The $9 plan does not scan receipts or track mileage. You can still type a cost as a line on an invoice. What you do not get is the photograph, the extracted fields, the markup, or the pile of costs waiting to be billed per client. If you rarely pass costs on, you may not need this. If clients expect you to front production, you do.

Correct the field that is unsure

You photograph the receipt. Incusia reads the vendor, the date, the total, the tax, the currency, and a category, and it marks how sure it is about each. High confidence fields you leave alone. A low confidence field is flagged, usually the tax line on a crumpled receipt or a total that includes a tip written in pen. You fix that field. You do not retype the whole receipt to correct one number.

The scan can be wrong. A total that includes a deposit and a balance can be read as the full price. A currency symbol that looks like another can be misread. The flag is the point. If nothing is flagged and the vendor is nonsense, edit it anyway. Confidence is a hint, not a guarantee. Incusia will not invent a tax amount it cannot see. An empty tax field stays empty until you fill it.

You can also forward receipts to a personal inbound address instead of photographing them in the app. The mail becomes the same expense, with the same duplicate check. Use that when the receipt arrives as a PDF from a vendor and you do not want to print it to photograph it. The address is yours. Do not publish it, or other people's receipts will land in your books.

Bill it back with the markup you agreed

Billable expenses group by client. You set a markup per client, so Harbor Co can be 10 percent and another client can be none. The panel shows the original amount, the markup, and the amount that will hit the invoice. One click adds it. The client sees the billed figure. Your cost and the markup are how you know the line is right before you send.

Mileage uses a rate you set, not a rate Incusia invents. Enter the distance and the rate you are allowed to use. The product does not look up a government mileage table for your country and it will not argue with your accountant about whether the trip was deductible. It multiplies the numbers you gave it. If the rate changes for the year, change it. Old trips keep the rate they were logged with.

A duplicate check compares a new receipt with one you already stored. If it looks like the same expense, you are stopped and asked whether to keep both, replace, or drop the new one. Two coffees for the same amount on different days are not the same receipt. The same PDF forwarded twice is. Acknowledge a real duplicate. Do not acknowledge one just to get past the warning if you have not looked.

The total you might deduct

Expenses you mark deductible add up for the year, split by category: supplies, travel, software, and whatever else you use. That card is a total, not a tax return. It does not know which costs your country allows. It knows which ones you marked. Hand the total to your accountant with the receipts behind it. Do not file the number because the card is confident.

Recurring expenses exist for the software subscription and the studio rent you would otherwise enter twelve times. They are not the same as a retainer you bill to a client. One is money out. The other is money in. A recurring expense can still be marked billable if a client is reimbursing a specific subscription. Most of them are not. Leave billable off unless the contract says they pay it.

Foreign receipts convert using the European Central Bank rate from the transaction date, not today's rate. A dinner in euros on 12 October becomes dollars at that day's rate, so your books do not drift every time you open the page. The details of that conversion, and the fact that your bank payout may differ, are on multi-currency.

What this will not do: it will not chase a client who refuses a reimbursable cost. Put the cost on the invoice and use open tracking like any other line. It will not scan a receipt that is a blank photo of a table. It will not decide markup if you have not set one. And it will not run on Starter. If you only need a place to type $48, the invoice line is enough.

A month of receipts, without the shoebox

Photograph on the day, not at tax time. A receipt in a coat pocket for six weeks becomes a photo of a crease. The vendor is a guess and the tax line is gone. The scan will flag both, and you will not remember either. The habit that matters is thirty seconds at the counter or at the desk when the PDF arrives. Forward the PDF to the inbound address the same afternoon. Future you is a worse bookkeeper than present you.

Once a week, open the pile that is not yet on an invoice. For each row, decide billable or not before you think about categories. Billable means a named client agreed to pay it, or the contract says they do. A taxi to your own studio is not billable because you were thinking about their project. A taxi to their press check is. Markup applies only after that decision. Ten percent of a personal coffee is not a business model.

Group the billable ones by client before you touch the invoice. Harbor's print, Harbor's courier, Harbor's stock image. Add them in one pass so the invoice does not go out on Tuesday and the courier arrives as a surprise line on Friday. Clients forgive a receipt you include. They do not forgive a second invoice for $18 that looks like you forgot. If the project invoice already went, add the cost to the next one and say so in the note, or send a small invoice the same week while the receipt is still obvious.

Mileage is the category people inflate and then regret. Log the trip when you take it: where, why, distance, the rate you are using this year. 'Client meeting, 18 miles, the rate in my settings' is a record. 'Somewhere in March, I think 40 miles' is a number your accountant will side-eye and a number you should not put on a client's invoice. If the client reimburses miles, the rate in the contract wins over the rate you wish you could charge.

Duplicates show up when you photograph and also forward the same PDF, or when a card feed and a photo describe one dinner. Stop. Look at the date, the vendor, and the total. Keep both only if they are genuinely two purchases. Replacing is right when the second copy is cleaner. Dropping is right when the first copy is already billed. If you keep both and bill both, you will invoice the client twice for one printer, and you will find out when they are annoyed, not when the warning appeared.

At the end of the month, read the deductible card as a question, not as a refund. Supplies $2,140: can you point at receipts? Travel $3,080: were those trips for clients or were two of them a weekend you marked in a hurry? Software $1,200: is that a tool the work needs? Unmark the ones you cannot defend. The total goes down. That is the feature working. A larger number is not a better year if you cannot explain it.

Recurring software charges should be a recurring expense so you are not photographing the same SaaS receipt twelve times. Rent too, if you have it. Do not mark them billable unless a contract names them. A client who pays a retainer is not automatically paying your Adobe line. If they are, the contract says the amount, and the expense should match the contract, not a rounded-up guess.

When you add costs to an invoice, name them so the client recognises the thing. 'Print, Paper and Co, 3 March' is a line they can approve. 'Expenses' is a line they will question, and a questioned line is a delayed invoice even when the design fee was fine. If markup is included, you do not have to show the markup as its own row unless the contract says you will. Showing cost plus markup is honest and sometimes required. Showing only the billed total is also honest if that is the price you agreed. Pick one and keep it for that client, so March and April do not look like different policies.